


premonition smiling in the dark (i can feel the story starting to arc)

by 8The_Great_Perhaps8



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: First Meetings, Friendship, Gen, Goblin Noble Nott, Pre-Stream (Critical Role), i wrote this after episode 3, written pre-everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 15:26:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13484382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8The_Great_Perhaps8/pseuds/8The_Great_Perhaps8
Summary: "You'll do everything you can'Cause you're never gonna let it get em down(When you find it all around)Yeah, it comes in waves, but it's hardest from the start"Nott and Caleb, at the beginning





	premonition smiling in the dark (i can feel the story starting to arc)

**Author's Note:**

> title & summary from 'best friend' by foster the people

They think it’s funny when they call her Nott the Brave.

“Nott the Brave,” they laugh, “so brave she runs from mice! So brave she runs from cooked meat!”

They don’t care that she’s the chieftain’s daughter, even now that she’s got her nose ring and her ear piercings. They just call her Nott the Brave even though she’s not brave at all and she does run from fights, even since her mother’s given her a dagger. She just doesn’t like fighting, even though she accidentally starts fights more times than she can count, and she can count the highest from all the goblins in the clan.

And, even though Nott doesn’t like fights doesn’t mean that she can’t do nothing. She’s real good at sneaking, so she’s the one that they send to scout the trail to see if anybody’s coming. And sometimes, when there’s people coming- not as many, lately, because locals know about the goblins in this forest- she’ll do a bit without the others, which is how she winds up with having more gold than anybody else in the clan. She’s quiet and she’s sneaky and when they laugh so hard at the idea of Nott the Brave, of Nott-who-ran-from-rabbit being brave, she goes out a little farther than the clan’s borders and she steals from people who nearly never notice her doing it. 

It gets to be a sort of itch, a need, a desperation that she can’t ever leave. She nips through travelers while her brothers and her sisters attack, and she takes the beautiful thing before everyone else starts going through and rifling through the pockets, even though she’s never one of the ones doing any kind of cutting. Sometimes the itch gets so bad that she’ll take from the other goblins- she stole a coin from Wib and a barrette from Poke and she’s so good at it that none of them ever think about maybe the chieftain’s daughter is the one taking everything.

She doesn’t even mind so much anymore when they laugh at calling her Nott the Brave, because she can take a thing from one of them and make up for it.

One night, when she’s scouting the trail for travelers who don’t know that goblins can be awake at night, she sees something that’s not a human or a gnome or a halfling or even an elf.

She sees a tall, tall human, probably two hers and a half tall, and he's coated with blood and he's got what looks like a very sharp knife, and he smells of burnt flesh and he's got the look in his eyes of someone who's out hunting goblins..

She runs back to the village straightaway, sprints into the center where the fire pit is and she screams at the top of her lungs about the monster that’s coming towards the village, about how great and terrible tall it was and about how much blood was all over it, and she gets the entire village so riled up that everybody starts gathering their weapons and running.

Nott leads them all to where she last saw the human, and prepares to start tracking it in case of if it’s gone too far.

But instead, she just finds the human man, lying face-down on the ground, not reacting and not doing anything, looking like he's just passed out.

Everyone freezes, and then they start guffawing.

“Thank you for your guidance, Nott the Brave!” Fim laughs. “What a terrible monster! Thank you for your warning!”

Kan starts screaming with laughter. “Nott the Brave, the most courageous goblin! Thanks to Nott, we’ve survived for so long!"

“What would we do without her?” Trin shrieks. “What in the world would we do without Nott!”

But all her mother the Chieftain does is look at her with her Look and say how disappointed she is in her daughter with only her eyes.

Everyone keeps laughing as they tie up the human on the carry-sticks and take him back to the village. They throw him into the holding hut, and they make Nott stay and guard him while the rest of them go off drinking. But Nott’s okay with it, really, because she pinches a necklace off of Dohn and a ring of off Ezzi when they push her in outside the bars.

She sits in the dirt for hours, scratching at the ground with a tree stick and drawing pictures of her saving the whole entire clan and then a picture of her beating up Kan and then a picture of the beast that she saw.

She’s been sitting in there too long- long enough that someone ought’ve come and taken over watch from her, but she stopped hearing the drunken laughing and reveling hours ago, which she figures means they’ve fallen asleep and it’s up to her to keep watch on the human.

Finally, once she’s started cursing Kan and Fim and Trin and Dohn and Ezzi in her mind and has erased all the pictures that she’s drawn in the sand, the human moans. Nott looks up sharply at the noise and drops the stick, readying her dagger instead.

The human groans into the dirt, doesn’t seem to mind that he’s face-down, and then finally pushes himself up into a sitting position. He looks around the hut, looks around the hut and seems to recognize that he’s not where he fell asleep.

“Hello?” He calls out in Common. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

Nott moves around the outside of the bars, and even though the human seems to be almost following her movement, he always seems to be looking a little in the wrong direction.

“I can hear you,” the human calls again. “Hello? Where am I?”

Nott sneaks out of the hut while the human keeps calling, and sees the entire tribe asleep surrounding the fire, apparently passed out after the revelry. She takes one of the clubs off of Kan, wraps it in a scrap of fabric off of her dress and dips it in the fire.

She walks back to the hut, where the human has finally stopped shouting, and he blinks when he sees Nott enter.

“Oh,” says the human. “Goblins.”

Nott nods. “Who are you?”

The human blinks, apparently surprised that she speaks Common. “Caleb,” he says. “Caleb Widogast.”

Nott nods at that and sits down, cross-legged. “Are you a monster?” She asks bluntly.

“What?” Caleb says, apparently surprised.

“Don’t say what,” Nott says. “I saw you. You smelled like burning human, and you have so much blood all over you and you had a great big knife on you! You must be a monster!”

Caleb blinks and stares. “I’m sorry that I frightened you. I'm not a monster. At least, I don't think.”

Nott puffs out her chest and looks down at Caleb, who’s only a half-inch shorter than her while he’s sitting. “I weren’t _frightened_. I’m called Nott the Brave! I’m not scared of nothin’.”

Caleb’s lip twitches at that declaration, but he doesn’t say anything. He just groans and stands up, and then he’s as tall as he was when Nott saw him in the forest.

“So,” he says. “What are you people planning on doing to me?”

Nott shrugs and holds her torch up higher so that she can see Caleb’s face. “Mama wants to eat you. So you’ll probably get roasted. Alive.”

Caleb blinks at her, surprised. “Why does your mother get to decide what happens to me?”

“Mama is the chieftain,” Nott tells him. “So, you know.”

“Wait a minute,” Caleb says. “You’re a _princess_?”

Nott shrugs. “Not really. I’m Mama’s daughter, so I have to be the toughest, but I’m not tough enough. But I’m real good at fleecin’ things offa people.”

“Really? How so?”

Nott holds out the necklace that the human was wearing. “And I’ve got other stuff from the other goblins. I’m real good at stealin’.”

Caleb laughs. “You do seem quite talented. If I may, could I get that back?”

Nott shrugs and passes the necklace back to Caleb.

“You know,” Caleb says, as he re-fastens his necklace, “I know a few tricks, as well. Would you like me to show you?”

Nott peeks outside the hut, makes sure that the goblins are all still asleep. She steps back in and nods.

“Okay. Watch this.”

Caleb begins moving his hands around, and as he does, bright lights begin dancing around the hut. Then, they gradually coalesce into one body that’s about the size of Nott, and whenever Nott moves, the lights move to mirror her.

“That is cool!” She exclaims in delight. “Are you some kinda magic man, or somethin’?”

Caleb laughs again. “You could say that, I suppose. I do know quite a few magic tricks.”

“I don’t know any,” Nott says. “I just sneak.”

Caleb sits back down, cross-legged, so that he’s eye-level with Nott. “Well, Miss Sneaky, what about you? What did you do to get to be called Nott the Brave?”

Nott deflates a bit. “It’s a joke,” she says quietly. “It’s ‘cause I run away from everythin’, even rabbits. An’ I don’t do any of the fightin’, not even now that I got a dagger from Mama.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Caleb says. “None of the other goblins are in here guarding the monster.”

“They don’t think that you’re a monster, though,” Nott sighs. “‘Cause when we got back to you, you were back to bein’ a human.”

“But they’re still not guarding me, even though I’m just a human right now,” Caleb says, and he sounds amazingly reasonable. “But you are guarding me, even though you saw me as a monster.”

Nott brightens off and her ears prick up. “You’re right! I am pretty brave!”

Caleb grins. “Yeah, you are. You’re the bravest goblin I’ve ever met.”

“But how many goblins have you met?” Nott asks.

“You,” Caleb replies, shrugging.

“So it’s not like you’d know,” Nott points out. “It’s nice of you to say, still.”

Caleb sighs and leans forward, propping up his chin with his right hand. “Are you going to eat me, still?”

Nott shrugs. “I don’t _want_ too. But I might hafta, dependin’ on what happens.”

“What do you mean?”

Nott shrugs. “Well, if Mama decides that it’s been long enough for me to be a coward, she might make me kill you.”

“How old _are_ you, Nott?” Caleb asks.

“Old enough!” Nott replies defensively. She’s thirteen, but that is plenty old for a goblin. “Old enough that Mama might be makin’ me start my fightin’ so I could be chieftain after she dies.”

As Caleb seems to be about to open his mouth to say something, Nott’s mother walks in.

“Nott-” she begins to say, and then she sees the human and the torch, and she slaps Nott.

“What the fuck are you doing?” She asks, in Goblin. “I told you to watch him, not to make friends with him! Fucking idiot!”

“Sorry, Mama,” Nott says, tucking her head down. “I was just threatenin’ him in Common, is all. Weren’t talkin’ to him.”

“Liar!” Nott’s mother yells. “You were making to be friends with him! You have to learn to fight, to kill!”

“I know how, Mama,” Nott protests. “I promise I know!”

“Prove it,” Nott’s mother hisses, fumbling with the dagger that her daughter keeps on her belt and trying to place it in her hands. “Kill him! Kill the human!”

There’s a commotion outside the hut, and Nott watches some fifteen more goblins gather, all staring.

“Kill the human, Nott the Brave,” Fim calls from the crowd. “Kill the human, Nott the Brave!”

The chant gets picked up very quickly, and eventually all the goblins are chanting for her to kill Caleb.

“Nott?” Caleb asks. “What’s going on, kiddo?”

Nott clutches the handle of the blade and turns to face Caleb. “They want me to kill you,” she says in Common.

“Oh,” says Caleb. “Will you?”

Nott shrugs.

“Kill him, Nott!” Nott’s mother shrieks. “Kill him!”

Nott flexes her fingers around the blade handle.

And she opens the door to the cage, and approaches Caleb.

“Sorry that I couldn’t help you,” Caleb says.

“Don’t apologize,” Nott says.

And she turns, and she flings her dagger into her mother.

And she guides Caleb out of the hut, sprinting as the goblins take in what has just happened. They only get a few dozen feet away before the goblins realize, and they began flinging arrows and daggers after them. Nott takes an arrow in the shoulder as they run, and she slowly feels the thudding coming from the poison that they dip their arrows in.

They keep running for another full five minutes, with Nott guiding them through the forest as the sun slowly rises, with her taking them through all the twists and turns and trails that she uses for scouting.

Finally, just after they duck out of the forest into the neighboring meadow, just in time for the sun to finally rise fully above the horizon.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Caleb says. “That was amazing, Nott! Thank you!”

“No… problem…” Nott pants. “I’m gonna. Fall asleep now.”

“Nott?” Nott hears Caleb ask, just as she falls down in the meadow.

When she wakes up, she’s lying on a straw mattress in some kind of wooden room, and Caleb is sitting on the ground next to the mattress with his face lying on it.

“Caleb?” She asks. “Caleb, are you awake?”

Caleb snorts and shakes his face back and forth as he wakes up. “Hey, Nott!”

“Where are we?” Nott asks.

“I took you to an inn, so you could rest,” Caleb says. “You seemed sick. You’ve been asleep for hours.”

“Oh,” says Nott, and she thinks. “What do I owe you?”

Caleb looks at her. “Nott, you saved my life! You don’t owe me anything. If anything, I owe _you_.”

“Sorry,” Nott says. “So do I. Do I gotta stay with you now? Like forever, like in the kidnap stories?”

Caleb looks at her again, with that Look. “Not if you don’t want to, Nott. You’re the bravest goblin I know, so I know you can go on your own if you want to, but I wouldn’t mind having some company.”

Nott considers, fingers the thin cotton blanket that Caleb’s tucked her under. “I mean, I like you,” she says. “But I’m a goblin, and most people don’t like goblins. I don’t wanna cause you no trouble.”

“Hey, it’s alright,” Caleb says. “Besides, I cause myself enough trouble. I don’t think that you could cause any trouble that I probably wouldn’t cause myself.”

Nott slowly sits up in the bed. “And you wouldn’t get tired of me or nothin’? An’ you actually want me to come with, like a friend?”

“Yeah, kiddo, just like a friend,” Caleb says. “I think you and me could be great friends, Nott.”

“Well…,” Nott says. “I guess I wouldn’t mind travelin’ with a friend. But you’d be the first friend I’d make.”

“Well, that’s okay,” Caleb says. “I think I could be a good friend for you to start with.” He smiles at Nott, and she smiles back, and that is their beginning.


End file.
